Iraq War: Ten years of consequences

This Tuesday, March 12, five Iraqi-American and American scholars will mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with an evening discussion forum on the UCSD campus. The broad consequences of the Iraq War deserve discussion and debate, but there is good reason to think the anniversary will pass mostly unnoticed. Universities are places for critical debate, and we decided to gather to discuss the meaning of the war from some unusual perspectives. We think the war deserves a commission of inquiry, but Americans may be too divided to critically examine traumatic episodes in the recent past.

The Iraq War has disappeared from public consciousness for reasons that are common to other cataclysms of the last century: the war was a completely man made disaster and its architects and enthusiasts remain prominent in public life. Iraq is out of the news, and there has been minimal public reckoning on the costs, benefits, and responsibilities of the war.

The war was sold to the public by a disinformation campaign that was breathtaking in its audacity and deception. Iraq was claimed to pose an immediate threat to the United States. Once we invaded, Iraqis would welcome U.S. soldiers and benefit handsomely from the U.S. invasion of their country.

The Bush administration had other more closely-held goals, which were successful in the short-term. The 2004 election campaign and historically unprecedented oil company profits since 2003 count among these successes. Other dreams did not come true. The U.S. occupation authorities attempted to privatize the Iraqi economy including petroleum. Iraq nationalized its oil in the early 1970s, but U.S. oilmen inside the government planned to sell Iraqi oil rights to American companies. U.S. strategic planners expected an American-installed Iraqi government to sign long-term leases for American military bases in Iraq, guaranteeing American military domination into the new century. Iraq would sign a peace treaty with Israel. Critics of the invasion and occupation of Iraq would eventually come around to the new order.

These rosy hopes did not materialize. The war created arguably the largest refugee crisis in Middle Eastern history. Nearly 10 percent of the population or some two million people became refugees outside the country. Tens of thousands of them now live in San Diego County. Some five million were internally displaced. Reputable estimates of Iraqi war dead range from 250,000 to over a million. The infrastructure and social fabric of Iraqi society was shredded. Sectarian conflict of a kind not found in Iraq before is now endemic to the country. Chronic psychological trauma and post-traumatic disorders are widespread. The U.S. government sent $31 million in aid to the Iraqi health ministry in 2012, which as an example, is less than the annual San Diego County budget for parks and recreation.

U.S. occupation authorities were ignorant and dismissive of Iraqi history, society, or politics, and dispensed favors on a flawed and simplistic sectarian-based schema of society. They saw Iraqi Kurds and Iraqi Shiites as reliable U.S. clients, and tarred Iraqi Sunnis as supporters of Saddam. Such calculations guaranteed sectarian civil conflict.

American war dead were almost all military rather than civilian, but their deaths were no less painful. There were 36,000 casualties among which were almost 4,500 dead. There were 550 deaths among private contractors. Many wounded will never fully recover, and post-traumatic stress and psychiatric ailments will remain a significant expense for decades to come.

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote a book about Iraq called "The Three Trillion Dollar War." Since publishing the book early in 2008, he has argued that the cost he compiled was too low. According to Stiglitz the worldwide economic crisis since 2008 is directly traceable to a 400 percent rise in oil prices between 2003 and 2008, which is directly traceable to the war. Oil prices have not come down, and the Iraq War costs people money every day.

Unlike past wars, the Bush administration borrowed the money spent invading Iraq, and that money and interest is now unavailable for other things, like education, roads, national parks and Social Security. What would it have paid for? Just one trillion dollars would pay for all 10 campuses of the University of California, tuition-free for everybody, for almost 50 years. We think that would have been a better investment.

Americans have many good reasons to want to forget Iraq, and better, but more painful reasons to remember. Amnesia won’t help anyone.

Provence is an associate professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at UCSD.